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GENOVA Version Control

GENOVA is an extendable version control system for Joomla, which allows you to compare and restore revisions of your Joomla articles.

Installation

Download the installation package from our site, install it using the extensions manager of your Joomla intallation and finally dont forget to enable the installed plugins manually after the installation is finished. After you've done that, you're good to go.

How does it work?

GENOVA version conrol works very similarly to the revisions management we know from Wikipedia. After you installed the component and enabled the neccessary plugins, every change you make to an article is stored as an new revision. You then have the oportunity to compare and restore all revisions that have been made to a particlular content item. Even if you restore a particular revision of the past, all the other revisions are NOT lost. The restored revision becomes a new content revision and is added to the top of the stack. This means, that you can securely change and restore articles as you wish, without the fear of loosing information.

Why you might need it?

With the introduction of ACL in version 1.6 Joomla has become more suitable for collaborative work in larger teams. The introduction of the smart search feature is the reason that Joomla is more and more used for knowledge management purposes. But managing knowledge and information requires security mechanisms for data not being accidentally deleted or changed by the users. This is not only important for data security but helps increasing user engagement at your site. Only if users can be sure that they don't accidentally mess up anything, they are willing to contribute their knowledge to the system.

Version control is also interesting for web developers and designers who create complex designs for their customers and want to enable the client to manage their site themselves. In these cases it is always good to be able to restore a previous version of an article in case the customer messed with the design.

How to manage your revisions

First you need to navigate to the revisions table of the particular content item. You can do so in three different ways:

Using the GENOVA Version Control admin component. Make sure that "Joomla Content Articles" is selected as context and then navigate to the corresponding article.

If you have the Editor-Extension Plugin enabled, you can use the revisions button, which is displayed below your editor.

If you have the content plugin enabled (and you have to, if you want GENOVA Version Control to work for Joomla articles), you can click on the "Revisions" link at the end of an article in the frontend. If you don't see this link and your plugin is enabled, please check the plugin parameters. Change the access level to your needs.

After that, you're at the revisions table of your content item. You can compare different versions and restore them, if you have the neccessary edit rights for that particular content item. If you don't have these edit rights but the neccessry access level to view the item, you can still see and compare the different versions of the item.

For Developers: GENOVA Version Control is extensible

Right now, GENOVA Version Control works for Joomla Articles out of the box. However, we've programmed it, so it can support any type of textual content stored by Joomla or its extensions. If you want to find out, how you can add version control to your component, please take a look at the GENOVA Version Control content plugin, as well as the Joomla Content GENOVA Version Control plugin that ships with the core installation. We have included a lot of in-code documentation in these two plugins. If you have further questions, please contact us at Diese E-Mail-Adresse ist vor Spambots geschützt! Zur Anzeige muss JavaScript eingeschaltet sein! (We understand English and German. Our French and Spanish is terrible!).